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Annual Review of Psychology Jan 2020The science of judgment and decision making involves three interrelated forms of research: analysis of the decisions people face, description of their natural responses,... (Review)
Review
The science of judgment and decision making involves three interrelated forms of research: analysis of the decisions people face, description of their natural responses, and interventions meant to help them do better. After briefly introducing the field's intellectual foundations, we review recent basic research into the three core elements of decision making: judgment, or how people predict the outcomes that will follow possible choices; preference, or how people weigh those outcomes; and choice, or how people combine judgments and preferences to reach a decision. We then review research into two potential sources of behavioral heterogeneity: individual differences in decision-making competence and developmental changes across the life span. Next, we illustrate applications intended to improve individual and organizational decision making in health, public policy, intelligence analysis, and risk management. We emphasize the potential value of coupling analytical and behavioral research and having basic and applied research inform one another.
Topics: Decision Making; Human Development; Humans; Individuality; Judgment
PubMed: 31337275
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010419-050747 -
Perspectives on Psychological Science :... Jan 2022Observed variability and complexity of judgments of "right" and "wrong" cannot be readily accounted for within extant approaches to understanding moral judgment. In...
Observed variability and complexity of judgments of "right" and "wrong" cannot be readily accounted for within extant approaches to understanding moral judgment. In response to this challenge, we present a novel perspective on categorization in moral judgment. Moral judgment as categorization (MJAC) incorporates principles of category formation research while addressing key challenges of existing approaches to moral judgment. People develop skills in making context-relevant categorizations. They learn that various objects (events, behaviors, people, etc.) can be categorized as morally right or wrong. Repetition and rehearsal result in reliable, habitualized categorizations. According to this skill-formation account of moral categorization, the learning and the habitualization of the forming of moral categories occur within goal-directed activity that is sensitive to various contextual influences. By allowing for the complexity of moral judgments, MJAC offers greater explanatory power than existing approaches while also providing opportunities for a diverse range of new research questions.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Learning; Morals
PubMed: 34264152
DOI: 10.1177/1745691621990636 -
Death Studies 2022This paper concerns the ethical judgment that lies at the heart of assessing requests for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada and Quebec, namely is it ethically... (Review)
Review
This paper concerns the ethical judgment that lies at the heart of assessing requests for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada and Quebec, namely is it ethically right to help the person requesting assistance to end his or her life? We address situations in which making this judgment may be challenging despite the person fulfilling legal eligibility requirements. Using three clinical cases that are challenging by virtue of the legal requirement that a person experience intolerable suffering we explore this issue. We review practice guidance provided to providers and assessors in six jurisdictions and discuss potential resources to inform the ethical judgments involved in MAID assessments.
Topics: Canada; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Quebec; Suicide, Assisted
PubMed: 34097584
DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2021.1926636 -
Progress in Brain Research 2019As a result of globalization, millions of people operate in a language that they comprehend well but is not their native tongue. This paper focuses on how the nativeness... (Review)
Review
As a result of globalization, millions of people operate in a language that they comprehend well but is not their native tongue. This paper focuses on how the nativeness of the language of a communication influences judgments and decisions. We review studies that compare decision making while people use a native language to when they use a nonnative language they understand well. The evidence shows that a nonnative language decreases the impact that emotions and socio-moral norms have on users, thereby reducing well-known judgmental biases and norm-related behavior. This effect of nonnative or foreign language brings to light the important role that the native language plays routinely in judgment and decision making. It suggests that the native language is not a simple carrier of meaning. Instead, it reveals that our native language serves as a carrier of emotions and socio-moral norms which in turn govern judgments and choices.
Topics: Brain; Decision Making; Emotions; Humans; Judgment; Language; Morals
PubMed: 31196437
DOI: 10.1016/bs.pbr.2019.02.003 -
Attention, Perception & Psychophysics May 2023Recall memory and sequential dependence threaten the independence of successive beauty ratings. Such independence is usually assumed when using repeated measures to...
Recall memory and sequential dependence threaten the independence of successive beauty ratings. Such independence is usually assumed when using repeated measures to estimate the intrinsic variance of a rating. We call "intrinsic" the variance of all possible responses that the participant could give on a trial. Variance arises within and across participants. In attributing the measured variance to sources, the first step is to assess how much is intrinsic. In seven experiments, we measure how much of the variability across beauty ratings can be attributed to recall memory and sequential dependence. With a set size of one, memory is a problem and contributes half the measured variance. However, we showed that for both beauty and ellipticity, with set size of nine or more, recall memory causes a mere 10% increase in the variance of repeated ratings. Moreover, we showed that as long as the stimuli are diverse (i.e., represent different object categories), sequential dependence does not affect the variance of beauty ratings. Lastly, the variance of beauty ratings increases in proportion to the 0.15 power of stimulus set size. We show that the beauty rating of a stimulus in a diverse set is affected by the stimulus set size and not the value of other stimuli. Overall, we conclude that the variance of repeated ratings is a good way to estimate the intrinsic variance of a beauty rating of a stimulus in a diverse set.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Mental Recall; Research Design
PubMed: 36918510
DOI: 10.3758/s13414-023-02672-x -
The International Journal of Social... Jun 2017The clinical assessment of insight solely employs biomedical perspectives and criteria to the complete exclusion of context and culture and to the disregard of values... (Review)
Review
BACKGROUND
The clinical assessment of insight solely employs biomedical perspectives and criteria to the complete exclusion of context and culture and to the disregard of values and value judgments.
AIM
The aim of this discussion article is to examine recent research from India on insight and explanatory models in psychosis and re-examine the framework of assessment, diagnosis and management of insight and explanatory models.
METHODS
Recent research from India on insight in psychosis and explanatory models is reviewed.
RESULTS
Recent research, which has used longitudinal data and adjusted for pretreatment variables, suggests that insight and explanatory models of illness at baseline do not predict course, outcome and treatment response in schizophrenia, which seem to be dependent on the severity and quality of the psychosis. It supports the view that people with psychosis simultaneously hold multiple and contradictory explanatory models of illness, which change over time and with the trajectory of the illness. It suggests that insight, like all explanatory models, is a narrative of the person's reality and a coping strategy to handle with the varied impact of the illness.
CONCLUSION
This article argues that the assessment of insight necessarily involves value entailments, commitments and consequences. It supports a need for a broad-based approach to assess awareness, attribution and action related to mental illness and to acknowledge the role of values and value judgment in the evaluation of insight in psychosis.
Topics: Adaptation, Psychological; Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; Humans; India; Judgment; Models, Educational; Psychotic Disorders; Schizophrenic Psychology
PubMed: 28504043
DOI: 10.1177/0020764017693655 -
Trends in Cognitive Sciences Sep 2007Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus,... (Review)
Review
Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus, when a person makes evaluative judgments or engages in a task, positive affect can enhance evaluations and empower potential responses. Rather than affect itself, the information conveyed by affect is crucial. Tests of the hypothesis find that affective influences can be made to disappear by changing the source to which the affect is attributed. In tasks, positive affect validates and negative affect invalidates accessible cognitions, leading to relational processing and item-specific processing, respectively. Positive affect is found to promote, and negative affect to inhibit, many textbook phenomena from cognitive psychology.
Topics: Affect; Cognition; Decision Making; Humans; Judgment; Thinking
PubMed: 17698405
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.08.005 -
Annual Review of Psychology Jan 2020Deceptive claims surround us, embedded in fake news, advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. How do people know what to believe? Truth judgments reflect... (Review)
Review
Deceptive claims surround us, embedded in fake news, advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. How do people know what to believe? Truth judgments reflect inferences drawn from three types of information: base rates, feelings, and consistency with information retrieved from memory. First, people exhibit a bias to accept incoming information, because most claims in our environments are true. Second, people interpret feelings, like ease of processing, as evidence of truth. And third, people can (but do not always) consider whether assertions match facts and source information stored in memory. This three-part framework predicts specific illusions (e.g., truthiness, illusory truth), offers ways to correct stubborn misconceptions, and suggests the importance of converging cues in a post-truth world, where falsehoods travel further and faster than the truth.
Topics: Deception; Humans; Judgment
PubMed: 31514579
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010419-050807 -
Acta Psychologica Jun 2019Metamemory research makes extensive use of judgments, such as judgments of learning (JOLs). In a JOL, people predict their chance of remembering a recently studied item...
Metamemory research makes extensive use of judgments, such as judgments of learning (JOLs). In a JOL, people predict their chance of remembering a recently studied item in a memory test. There is a general agreement that JOLs rely on probabilistic cues that are combined in an inference process. Accuracy as measured by the gamma correlation between JOLs and actual performance is usually mediocre, suggesting limited metacognitive abilities. In judgment and decision-making research, Brunswik's lens model is often used to decompose judgmental accuracy: A matching index G measures how adequately people's cue weights match the optimal weights, two reliability indices assess the predictability of judgments and environment, respectively, and a nonlinear component measures systematic variance not captured by the cues. We employed the lens model equation for the first time to analyze four published and one new JOL data sets. There was considerable interindividual variance in metamemory monitoring. Although gamma was on average higher than the Pearson correlation, it still underestimated metacognitive ability in terms of matching (G). Also, the nonlinear component was considerably higher than in other judgment domains, pointing to substantial item-person-interactions that we interpret as idiosyncratic encoding strategies. An exploratory cluster analysis suggests different metacognitive strategies used by subgroups of participants. We suggest the lens model as a potentially promising tool in metacognition research.
Topics: Attention; Decision Making; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Mental Recall; Metacognition; Photic Stimulation; Random Allocation; Reproducibility of Results; Time Factors; Young Adult
PubMed: 31158737
DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.04.011 -
Psychological Bulletin Jan 1995Evidence for the role of affective states in social judgments is reviewed, and a new integrative theory, the affect infusion model (AIM), is proposed as a comprehensive... (Review)
Review
Evidence for the role of affective states in social judgments is reviewed, and a new integrative theory, the affect infusion model (AIM), is proposed as a comprehensive explanation of these effects. The AIM, based on a multiprocess approach to social judgments, identifies 4 alternative judgmental strategies: (a) direct access, (b) motivated, (c) heuristic, and (d) substantive processing. The model predicts that the degree of affect infusion into judgments varies along a processing continuum, such that judgments requiring heuristic or substantive processing are more likely to be infused by affect than are direct access or motivated judgments. The role of target, judge, and situational variables in recruiting high- or low-infusion judgmental strategies is considered, and empirical support for the model is reviewed. The relationship between the AIM and other affect-cognition theories is discussed, and implications for future research are outlined.
Topics: Affect; Humans; Interpersonal Relations; Judgment; Personality; Social Environment; Social Perception
PubMed: 7870863
DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.117.1.39